February Traffic and Income Report – $26,245.58

We started doing these reports over three years ago. You can check out each one of the over forty posts that we’ve written here or start from the beginning by reading our first income report here.

“Why in the world would you publish a post like this on a food blog?” you ask.

Great question!

When Pinch of Yum first started growing four and half years ago, we started to research what it would take to create an income from a food blog. There were two general opinions that people had:

It’s not possible.

It’s totally possible.

We decided to put those two opinions to test and do an experiment in the form of a monthly report on how much income the blog was able to create in the previous month. We called it “the food blog money making experiment.” We’ve continued on with the reports each and every month since we started. The experiment continues this month!

It’s important to know that creating an income from a blog isn’t easy. Far from it, actually. It takes a lot of time, dedication, failure, late nights, early mornings, posting when you don’t necessarily feel like posting, etc, etc, etc… While it’s really easy to start a blog, it’s really hard to maintain a blog.

Our hope with these reports is that they help you find some shortcuts to finding success with your own venture, whether it be a business, non-profit, or blog.

Let’s jump in!

A quick note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. All of the products listed below are products and services we’ve used before. If you have any questions about any of the income or expenses you can leave a comment and I’ll do my best to reply.

Net Profit: $26,245.58

RPM

RPM is an advertising metric that shows you how much revenue your website earns for every 1,000 page views. It’s a helpful metric because it allows you to see how effective you are at monetizing your blog.

Below is the RPM that we had for Pinch of Yum in the month of February.

Traffic Totals

Below are some screenshots from Google Analytics. You can click on these images to view a larger size.

Traffic Overview

Top Ten Traffic Sources

Mobile vs. Desktop Traffic

Singular Purpose for Pages and Posts

Say that three times fast!

In the December report we talked about the different kinds of visitors that come to your blog and the fact that monetization strategies differ depending on the type of visitor.

The basic idea was that advertising works well for visitors that are coming to grab a quick recipe and then leave the site.

But advertising doesn’t work well in every situation.

One example on Pinch of Yum where advertising doesn’t make sense are the food photography posts. These are low traffic posts (when compared to the recipe posts) but it’s a really specific visitor that is coming to those pages: visitors interested in food photography.

In February Pinch of Yum received 31,000 page views on posts having to do with food photography (including the Tasty Food Photography sales page).

Those page views resulted in $4,357.00 of revenue for the blog.

That’s an RPM of $140.00! (if you’re not familiar with RPM, check out the section above or read this post on Food Blogger Pro).

To contrast, Pinch of Yum’s RPM for ad networks is $4.07.

That means by including ads on all of the food photography pages, we were only earning an extra $126.00 each month.

But here’s the thing. My guess is that we were actually making less overall each month, because by including distracting ads we were making it more likely that people would leave the page early or get distracted from the main goal, which in this case was to purchase Tasty Food Photography.

So what did we do? We stripped away the sidebar on every food photography related post.

They went from looking like this:

to this:

with the bottom of the post having a call to action like this:

And the results? Well, it’s still a little early to say for sure as we just made the switch on March 10th, but the analytics from this post gives us a good indication of the impact:

Here’s what this screenshot is showing us:

Before we changed that page to single column with a strong call to action, it would average $0.02 of Tasty Food Photography sales for every page view. If we were to include the average income we earn from ads it would bring the total RPM for that page to just over $24.

After we took the sidebar out, centered the content, and added a strong call to action the Page Value more than doubled to $.05, bumping the RPM to $50.

The point: Be intentional about how you craft content on your blog. Remember that not all visitors are created equal when it comes to monetization. Pages and posts that have a strong tie to a product or affiliate links are usually not good pages to also monetize with traditional ads.

Preliminary Pinterest Results: Long vs. Short Images

Hello friends! It’s meeeeee.

Last month I introduced a new project related to Pinterest image style and engagement. We wanted to know which recipe image format was most engaging on Pinterest – specifically long pins with text vs. short pins.

If you want to know more about how we set up the project, you can check out the overview that was described last month.

What I really want to share today are some very basic, very preliminary results from this experiment. We are still only about two thirds of the way through in terms of scheduling out all the long pins with their corresponding short pins and comparing the performance results. But that being said, our Pinch of Yum intern Abby and I took a look at a random sampling of twelve corresponding long and short pins thus far and documented the performance for each one.

Here is what we found in looking at long vs. short pin performance (ONLY from our own Pinterest account):

The long pins got more repins 87% of the time. In this case, that is just 10 out of 12 times – next month we’ll see how that number compares when we look at a larger, more complete set of data.

On average, the long pins got 37% more repins than the short pins.

After three hours of looking deeeeeeep down into all the data so far and factoring in all the multi-dimensional layers of Pinterest (whew! she’s a doozy, that Pinterest), I asked Abby to share some of her thoughts on this whole experiment thus far.

Abby says:

“In general, we’re finding that collage pins with text are the most engaging when it comes to being repinned. These pins have two different images with simple text which are valuable because they catch the pinner’s attention right away.

We’ve tried two styles for the long pin text – one with a more artfully designed brushy text and one with a more standard handwriting font. The pin style with brushy text is beautiful, but we’ve concluded that most people who pin Pinch of Yum recipes are pinning recipes for practical purposes. I can imagine that the brushy text gives off a fancy or complicated vibe, which might not be the most appealing to the Pinch of Yum audience. The Pinch of Yum Pinterest audience generally favors recipes that are practical and approachable, which leads to a preference for pins that have multiple images and/or somewhat of a tutorial piece to them. Examples of successful pins that fall under this umbrella include Sticky Garlic Chicken (2600+ repins) and Whole Wheat Apple Pancakes (2100+ repins).

But the most important thing we’ve noticed is that Pinterest can be an overwhelming beast when it comes to predicting what will be successful and what will flop. For example, we’ve seen the exact same recipe and photo get 23k pins on one board and 38 pins on another board with the total number of followers on each board being really similar.”

If anything, this project has brought up more questions than answers. Here are some of the things we’re hoping to get more clarity on in the coming weeks and months:

Are the results the same outside of our Pinterest account? This is super important because most of our Pinterest referral traffic and engagement with Pinch of Yum content comes from OTHER PEOPLE’S PINTEREST ACCOUNTS, not our own. So once we get a feel for what our own followers like, we want to look at the broader Pinterest audience to find out which pin type, if any, is more likely to have that virality factor.

What are the implications of the new Pinterest feed display style (mobile) that changed this last weekend? Will that now crop our long images to squares in the feed?

What are the factors (especially ones that are in our control) that impact reach of any given pin? We need to research this more.

How often do people choose to pin long pins vs. short pins directly from a post on pinchofyum.com? This is proving to be super hard to track other than just looking at our Pinterest source page – if you have any awesome ideas, I’m all ears.

So, like Bjork said, what’s the point?

The point: Long pins have been engaging for our audience, but not significantly more engaging than our short single image pins. Until further notice, we will continue creating long pins for the time being because they allow us to promote the same content in a new, fresh, attention-getting way AND because they stand out more easily in search results.

But ultimately, awesome content prevails. Long pins or short pins, text or no text, Wednesday or Saturday… it’s all secondary to creating really helpful, awesome recipes and communicating those recipes through stunning photography. It’s the content that wins in the long run, not the pins.

One final word: we (content creators) are just sort of little pawns in the Pinterest game. (But we ♡ u anyway, Pinterest!) The reality is that Pinterest could change its algorithm tomorrow and no longer allow long , text-based images and it would be OUT OF OUR CONTROL. Which is kind of scary, but good scary. It’s so important for us as content creators to balance the optimization of social media with content and strategy that we have full control over – like what’s happening on our blogs or our email lists.

Our third and final comprehensive data report will be here next month! Be sure to check back if you’re into that kinda nerdery.

BlogHer to Federated Media

We’ve officially ended our contract with BlogHer and have signed on with Federated Media. Unfortunately, the ad network industry is one that is constantly changing, which means that as a publisher you need to constantly be on the look out for ad networks that are performing well.

As many of you know, the performance of BlogHer has continued to slide over the past few months, making us realize that is was finally time for us to start looking for alternatives. We’re excited to start with Federated Media and see how it goes.

The BlogHer team has been awesome to work with over the past three years. A huge thank you to the entire team at BlogHer who has enabled us to make a living doing what we love during this chapter of Pinch of Yum history.

Speaking of ad stuff: As Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro have continued to grow we’ve started to look for ways that we can start building out a team. We know that we can’t do everything on our own.

One of the things we’d like to delegate is the ad operations for Pinch of Yum. We’re in the research phase, but I’d love to hear if you have any thoughts or insight on this.

Inhale, Exhale

Lately I’ve been trying to find a life pattern of figurative inhaling and exhaling – taking things in that give me energy and joy and rest (the inhale), and then doing things that give me purpose and expression and challenge (the exhale).

This inhale/exhale concept has been a powerful balancer for me lately.

Even before blogging was a part of my life, my default has always been the exhale. I am a doer – I know how to task-manage stuff and I feel REALLY GOOD when I get things done. I enjoy the process of crossing things off my list and pushing to get just ONE MORE THING done before the end of the day. Exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale, and guess what? Now-I’m-running-out-of-breath.

I think this is why I feel frantic, like, always. It’s in my nature to always find something to be frantic about, to always find a way to be busy, to run myself out of breath. If you are feeling so sympathetic towards Bjork right now, you get it.

My frantic self isn’t my best self. Even though I love checking off the to-do list, I want to experience life in a balanced way.

So I’m trying to do some of both. To inhale, I’m reading books. Drinking slow-drip coffee from our new Chemex while reading said books. Taking late morning walks. Or runs. Or just walks, because sometimes walks are just so much better than runs. Watching nightly YouTube pug videos with Bjork. Having weeknight dinners with friends JUST BECAUSE.

This idea is not my genius – it is borrowed from Glennon Melton Doyle, teller of truth and funny stories, inspirer of balance, and author of (affiliate link ->) Carry On, Warrior, which you should now go out, buy, and devour through all kinds of tears in one sitting. I mean, you guys, we’re talking about a book of short essays with almost 900 5-star customer reviews.

Kthanksbye.

Being a spectator to your own thoughts

I’ve always been fascinated/inspired by Richard Branson’s relaxed-high-fiving-billionaire-don’t-care-do-care-cool-uncle vibe, so whenever I see a blog post or tweet of his come across my screen I take time to check it out. Most recently it was a post about happiness, where he talks about his friend Ray’s five steps to happiness.

Here they are:

Living in the moment.

Being a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional.

Better to be loving than right.

Grateful for at least one thing every day.

To help others every chance you get.

The one that really intrigued me was the second one; “being a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional.”

It’s something that I’ve tried to work on lately, but it’s easier said than done.

I’ve found this to be most helpful when I’m feeling threatened by someone else’s good work (“wow, look at that cool thing that person did that everyone loves…”), discouraged with how my day went (“dang, I didn’t really get that much stuff done…”), or down and out because of negative feedback (“you smell like an ogre…*”).

*not an actual comment I received, but some days it could be true.

I think of it as peeling back the layers on an onion, knowing that when I get to the core and see the emotion for what it is then I can usually address it easier.

Peeling back the layers of emotions is especially important if you do creative work, like blogging, speaking, photography, or acting, because the impact that small actions (a negative comment, a mean email, a bad review) can have on your emotions can be significant, and sometimes can often times keep you from doing your work.

My encouragement to you this month is, when faced with a certain thought, take some time to peel back the layers on it so you can see what’s at the core.

Like an onion.

Which is a good note to end on, because at the end of the day, this is still a food blog.

Booya!

Because of You

We say it all the time, but it’s because it’s true! It’s because of you that this little hobby-turned-career food blog called Pinch of Yum can exist as it does today. Thank you so much for making these recipes and sharing this yummy, warm, sometimes spicy (!) food around the table with your families and friends.

When we lived in Cebu and worked at the orphanage, I was deeply moved by the child care workers – their unwavering willingness to stand in the gap of mom and dad for the kids who called CSC home was beyond inspiring. I get a tiny bit misty-eyed just thinking about it – these aunties and uncles work so, so, so hard and they care for the children with as much love, affection, and tenderness as if they were their own.

So needless to say, we’re really excited to be partnering with such a great organization (hooray Habitat!) to help build strong, safe homes for to the people who have spent so much of their time and energy caring for orphans. You can learn more about the project here.

71 Comments (page 1)

As always, I love these! Especially about the bit about Richard Branson, you know, you can rent his Necker Island home for only about $30,000 g’s a night. Hey, that’s about a months salary for you guys, no biggie! I have seen the place, but by boat on vaca, It was pretty cool though!!!

Anyhow, I’m officially making a T-Shirt that says “I agree with Bjork” Did you want one? I’m getting them in orange.

Loving how you guys give back, in all seriousness, that’s the most important thing. We give 10% or more to our church every month and it never ceases to amaze me how God blesses us tenfold on that if not more. I’m not a believer in Prayer of Jabez, opposite of that, but for whatever reason, God’s has chosen to bless us, especially with my blog! No, I don’t make what you guys make, but if you can make some $$, you can make more. And no, it’s not easy! Thanks for saying that again.

Hey guys,
first of all, awesome report! That you faithfully take the time to produce this report for the rest of us every month is AMAZING. Thank you. I have to agree that starting a blog is far easier than maintaining one–let alone maintaining it with success. I’ve been so blessed and relatively successful in my short few months of blogging, but I do often struggle with thoughts of where things are headed and how I can’t seem to do everything on my list in one day! Yesterday, I kid you not, my morning prayer was, “Lord, please make me a ninja. I need to move swiftly and strategically. I need the stamina and determination of a ninja so I can get things done.” I know, so odd a prayer, right? Bijork’s comment about being a spectator to your own thought hit me between the eyes. Because especially in phase I of building your presence as a blogger, you will face so much that will make you feel down and second-guess yourself. Peeling back layers in order to address emotions is so important in our business of blogging.
Great insights; both practical and inspirational. Thanks all! Gotta go do some writing before my littles wake up. See ya 🙂

I love these posts. The Pinterest stuff is really interesting, but I also enjoyed the non-blog stuff at the end here. Lyndsay – I totally feel you on the inhale/exhale thing. I’ve been doing way too much exhaling myself. It’s all stuff I WANT to be doing, but I know that if I don’t cut back and give myself some time to just relax, I’m literally going to kill myself with my own ambition. Thanks for sharing, you guys!

I absolutely love this blog. It’s been one of my fav’s since I first discovered you years ago via the butternut squash mac&cheese recipe. I am so happy for all of your success as you both work so hardly to keep it going. Kudos!!…and congrats on your new beagle love 🙂

Thank you both SO MUCH for these reports! Even when I have no clue what you are talking about (ha!) I feel like I’m learning a ton and that eventually I’ll bump into a situation and have an “a-ha!” moment and think, “Oh THAT’S what Bjork was prattling on about!” 😀

As far as Pinterest and images go, I’ve been using Pinterest for a little over 4 years personally and am now dipping a toe into the professional pinning pond for my fledging blog. It’s interesting how the two are roughly similar but almost wildly divergent. But I digress.

What I meant to get into was as an average pinner, I prefer vertical, but not long images. So like a 4×6 equivalent, I guess, rather than super long ones I have to scroll trough to get to the info at the bottom. This is even more important when I’m on my phone, which is about 40% of the time. I also prefer images with text ESPECIALLY for recipes – I can’t always trust the person I’m repinning from got the info correct comments area (this drives my OCD up a wall… ahem). What that boils down to is that the images you’ve been testing recently are the ones I’ve been pinning, mostly because of the text, less because of the size/collage. TMI? At any rate, you may want to run a poll or something if you’re really curious about the types of images peeps prefer to pin. 😀 #pinnersgonnapin

Thank you for another great, informative, and mind-blowing post! I love your ideas about diversifying and creating your content and adds really thinking about the reader. This is something that I need to improve on and have a lot of wok to do on my blog. But in my “outside blogging” work schedule I can very much relate to live in the moment and create that balance.

YES!!! This was the BEST —> “But ultimately, awesome content prevails. Long pins or short pins, text or no text, Wednesday or Saturday… it’s all secondary to creating really helpful, awesome recipes and communicating those recipes through stunning photography. It’s the content that wins in the long run, not the pins.”

I manage Pinterest accounts for bloggers and my main mission is to free them up to create awesome content because that is what will drive their traffic on all platforms. Pinterest is all over the map these days with their algorithm changes and funky mobile feed. Best to stay consistent with what is within your control.

These reports are great! I just started checking in on them after I listened to your podcast with Pat Flynn. If you ever have any questions about Pinterest I’m happy to help.

I find the reports utterly amazing! The business you both have built together is absolutely incredible, but what I think really sets you apart is your complete honesty and willingness to share!

I find the Pinterest stuff very interesting, but after reflecting, I can see why it’s true. I always find myself re-pinning the longer/more textual pins because I know they are more likely to link to the actual recipe instead of something like a photography website.

These reports are absolutely amazing! The information that you share and the ideas that you present are so helpful and motivating. It puts me light years ahead of where I would be as I am slogging around in the technology. And you make it fun. You are both very gifted. Thank you.

I always love these posts – it’s so interesting to get a behind the scenes view into how this blog runs. Thanks for letting us in on the nitty gritty!

As far as Pinterest goes, for some reason I shy away from pinning longer images. I can’t explain why, but I’m always attracted to just the plain photographs. That being said, I pretty much never browse Pinterest and basically just use it as a place to store recipes that I pin directly from blogs, so I’m probably not the best example 🙂

Love these inspiring and informative income reports. I noticed something scary. Is it correct that less only 1% of your traffic comes from Facebook? Am I missing something. You have 38,000 fans. Is Facebook really that bad now unless you pay for ads. Any thoughts on this? I’m wondering if I should even try to build my Facebook page or just focus on Pinterest and Twitter. Thanks and you guys are amazing!

Haha – Facebook is a bit of a tough nut to crack these days. We have never had Facebook as a major source of traffic, so when the algorithm changed we decided to focus on keeping the page alive and strategizing for engagement rather than traffic. It hasn’t been super successful, to be honest. Our most successful posts on Facebook are usually posts from sites like Buzzfeed, but obviously those aren’t going back to the blog, and even on a good day we will reach only about 5-10% of our fans. If you (or anyone) has strategy recommendations moving forward, we’re all ears! I should mention we are using Facebook for ads for Food Blogger Pro and those have been successful.

Pinterest is currently my top referrer URL, and I schedule my pins to get a decent amount of traffic to my blog each day – but as Abby said, the algorithm could change any day, and it could be much harder for us bloggers to get traffic through it (like the change with Facebook has affected so many bloggers). Crossing my fingers that it doesnt happen anytime soon.

Regarding moving over to Federated Media – Is Federated Media only for extremely large bloggers? I’ve been using BlogHer for about slightly less than a year, and it pays ok, but not fantastic, given that it has an Above the fold 300×600 ad on my blog (which should be paying a lot higher).

Am wondering if I should sign up for Federated Media too (if they allow me, since I’m not a huge blogger)!

I love that you support CSC. It makes me happy that the workers are “aunties” and “uncles;” I’m Chinese by heritage, and this is how one respectfully refers to people older than yourself. (Also super handy at family reunions where everyone knows you but you don’t know them…”Oh, hi, Auntie!” and run away…).

On the topic of Pinterest, I’ve started pinning longer images also. I agree that I don’t like them to be too long, because I do use my boards for practical meal planning and don’t want to spend all my time scrolling. But despite my original unwillingness to pin bigger images at all, I do like pretty pictures, and it is nice when the title of a thing shows up on the pin.

I have found that I seem to have a minimum size that I’ll pin as well. Some websites only offer teeny tiny images (where I feel like I can’t see anything) and I’ll pin them but I’ll grumble the whole time.

Ditto everyone else – “Thank you” – what an encouragement! I really like your long pins and was wondering what you use to create them? I have used pic monkey before as well as another site – just wondering!

Wow! Lindsay and Bjork, you are both an inspiration to me. I learned about you from your appearance on the SPI podcast and was very impressed by what you were able to achieve in so little time. Never mind your recipes make me want to eat my screen!

Thank you so much for generously sharing what you could easily keep to yourselves.

Hi Lindsay and Bjork
I enjoy reading your monthly report most, though I do not have my own blog. However there’s one thing that puzzles me: I never see any ads, ever. Where are they? How are you making income when all I see is Lindsay’s recipes? I occasionally Pin a recipe but I can’t recall anyone repinning from my board (sorry).

Hey Sky – most people won’t see them if you’re using a mobile device or iPhone. Right now they’re primarily showing on desktop computers. Check it out next time you’re at your computer and you should see them.

I just want to let you know that I discovered your blog yesterday afternoon and have been pinning my little heart out because your recipes just look amazing and simple and delicious and appealing and awesome and delicious and.. you get the point! Thanks so much 🙂

Thaaaaaank you for sharing these reports! I’ve been following them for a while, but posting a comment for the first time. Its amazing how open you guys are about these. Your taking the time to write about new projects that you undertake, research that you do etc. goes a long way in helping us newbies. I had a question – to be able to pin the long form Pinterest images, would you always need to incorporate them in your post? Or is there another way to pin them and direct pinners to the blog/post? Thank you!

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